Claire is a Research Fellow of the IFS and Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Birmingham.

She was previously Programme Director of the Skills sector at IFS. Her research interests focus on the determinants of educational attainment and HE participation, including the roles of socio-economic status, expectations and aspirations, month of birth and parents' marital status. She is particularly interested in how education policy can be used to improve the outcomes of children from disadvantaged backgrounds, and has played a leading role in the evaluations of a number of education programmes aiming to do just that, including on behalf of the Department of Education and the Education Endowment Foundation.

Academic outputs

There is substantial evidence of a significant relationship between parents’ income and sons’ earnings in the UK, and that this relationship has strengthened over time. We extend this by exploring a broader measure of net family income as an outcome.

Many governments are considering expanding childcare subsidies, but little is known about the impact of such policies on parent’s labour supply. Exploiting free childcare eligibility rules based on date of birth in a difference-in-differences framework, we compare the effects of offering free ...

Reports and comment

Despite receiving 55% of A levels overall in 2018, girls received just 43% of A levels awarded in STEM subjects. Rachel Cassidy, Sarah Cattan and Claire Crawford explore what drives girls’ A level choices, including why they may or may not opt for maths or physics.

There is a large gender gap in the likelihood of taking maths and physics at A-level, even among high-achieving pupils. Among pupils who achieved grade A or A* (equivalent to grades 7-9) in GCSE maths in 2010, 36.5% of girls compared to 51.1% of boys took maths A-level. Among those who achieved ...